Explore "The Woman with the Fan" by Robert Hichens on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
LADY HOLME never forgot that first evening at Casa Felice. The / strangeness of it was greater than the strangeness of any nightmare. / When she was shut up in her bedroom in London she had thought she / realised all the meaning of the word loneliness. Now she knew that then / she had not begun to realise it. For she had been in her own house, in / the city which contained a troop of her friends, in the city where she / had reigned. And although she knew that she would reign no more, she had / not grasped the exact meaning of that knowledge in London. She had known / a fact but not fully felt it. She had known what she now was but not / fully felt what she now was. Even when Fritz, muttering almost terrified / exclamations, had stumbled out of the bedroom, she had not heard the / dull clamour of finality as she heard it now.
She was an exile. She was an outcast among women. She was no longer / a beautiful woman, she was not even a plain woman -- she was a / dreadful-looking human being.